101–110 of 172 posts
Really? Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?" Given the popularity of Macs in the developer community, it's pretty clear that you have as much control as you desire—Unix has incredible power. And if you still somehow feel that OS X is actually constricting you (rather than just hiding advanced settings in the command line), you'd never be able to run Linux on a Mac. No,…
Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work - it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management,…
It's the hardware and the fact that it's Unix. Seriously, the Macbook Pro is a beautifully designed machine. The only things that could compete with it would be similarly priced Thinkpads etc, but you have to install and customize your OS on them. I agree that the OS X interface is overhyped but most of the problems you mention can be fixed in a couple of minutes. I use a free window manager to do basic manipulation…
People give macports a hard time, but I've never been sure why. It does binary or source distribution. It finds and fixes broken library linkage after upgrades. You can prune your install tree easily with the leaves target. All the functions are under one command, and it comes with a clear and concise manpage. I've used ports, pkgsrc, apt and rpm, and am generally very happy with macports in comparison, especially since default binary installs..
Anyway, I'm not trying to start an argument or anything - your opinion is your opinion. Besides, even if OS X users don't like macports for package management they can always use homebrew (or fink, I guess).
Yes switching workspaces is such a pain on OSX... come on, you just swipe with your fingers. Sure you can do pretty much the same on any linux distro, but that doesn't mean it is not 'seamless' in OSX. We can all agree that windows is just not suited for Rails development, but whatever floats your boat is fine of course. I like crunchbang linux a lot, it is very fast and makes you feel smart. But when it comes to som…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go Up One Level = Command + Up Arrow
Both of you guys seem to have missed GP say: "You either have to know the keyboard shortcut, or you have to go to the Go menu." As in, yes you can go up a level, but not in the way that many expect, and/or not without switching to the keyboard. Neither of which are marks of amazing interface design... which I think is his point.
Then you can go up a level, or many levels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's thoughts on the matter (and on many other matters) is that the user shouldn't ever have to learn to do anything complicated, and rather than risk them not knowing how to do something, they'd rather remove the feature entirely. This is reflected in their window and file management: you get the bare minimum you need to do the job done. The worst example of where this doesn't help is the Zoom button. Not the max…
This is true, and after much frustration I did finally deduce the intended behavior. However, it still isn't quite consistent (or rather, wasn't the last time I worked on a mac, circa 2008) and still seems to be lacking in functionality that the user actually wants . In all my years of working with text editors, I don't think I've ever found myself thinking "This viewport is too small. I wish I could quickly resize i…
Amusingly enough, the only things it doesn't really work well for are things that reflow their content arbitrarily to fill the window: text, HTML, and terminals. The three things developers spend all their time looking at!
Really? Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?" Given the popularity of Macs in the developer community, it's pretty clear that you have as much control as you desire—Unix has incredible power. And if you still somehow feel that OS X is actually constricting you (rather than just hiding advanced settings in the command line), you'd never be able to run Linux on a Mac. No,…
In general, there is very little to reason to buy a Macbook if you want a capable Linux laptop. I only have an MBA because my company gave it to me. Better to buy a similarly-priced Thinkpad and use that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both of you guys seem to have missed GP say: "You either have to know the keyboard shortcut, or you have to go to the Go menu." As in, yes you can go up a level, but not in the way that many expect, and/or not without switching to the keyboard. Neither of which are marks of amazing interface design... which I think is his point.
view > show path bar Then you can go up a level, or many levels.
Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work - it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management,…
I'll try to explain what I like about the Mac and what bothers me when I use Linux. Since you mentioned window management, I'll focus on that, comparing it to Ubuntu 12.
1. Window resizing in OS X is way nicer. It's actually possible to resize a window with a scrollbar from the lower right (on Ubuntu, the click target is literally one pixel wide). Resizing from the left edge doesn't result in weird tearing and graphics artifacts like it does in Ubuntu and Windows. The command key allows you to drag, resize, and do other interactions with windows without bringing them to the front. OS X also supports centered and fixed-aspect ratio resizing (shift and option keys); if this is possible on Ubuntu I couldn't find it.
2. The way hiding / minimization works in Ubuntu is very confusing to me. There doesn't seem to be a way to show all the minimized windows for an app, except for the weird and jarring Exposé knockoff that you get when you click on one of the icons in the Launcher.
3. Workspaces in OS X are much nicer. To move a window to another workspace in OS X, I just press it against the relevant side of the screen, or swipe up to enter Mission Control and drag it there. On Ubuntu, you can't drag windows to another workspace; you can instead use the context menu or press control-alt-arrow, which causes the window to disappear with no indication of where it went.
4. It's hard to distinguish the foreground window from other windows in Ubuntu. The only thing that seems to change is the titlebar. Even the text selection color is the same for foreground and background windows.
5. Focus stealing issues in Ubuntu are rampant. Click on a slow launching app like LibreWriter; when it finishes launching it will jump in front of the window you are currently using, and steal the keyboard focus. This happens occasionally on OS X and it bugs the hell out of me. I don't think I could stand an OS where that is the default behavior.
There's certainly some places where I find Ubuntu to be nicer, and some places that OS X falls down. My overall impression, though, is that OS X is more polished, and that Ubuntu has more clumsy knock-offs of OS X features.
The author mentioned using "Chromium with Vimium". For someone wanting easy keyboard shortcuts (like Vim) for a browser, I'd recommend luakit. It's a webkit based browser, scriptable (or written with?) lua, along with vim style navigation (eg, ":open www.google.com" to go to google). afaik, it's also available in the arch core (or extra possibly) repositorys, which means no fiddling about with the aur! (good news)
Turns out it's in arch community. Note: AUR isn't really that bad, as long as you install a package manager that handles it (like yaourt).
Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work - it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management,…